‘Fake News!’: the view from Israel’s Occupation

Over the course of the last two decades, amidst the
ascendance of nationalist extremism in Israel, the fraudulence charge has grown
ever stronger among the Jewish right-wing public.

Screenshot Facebook post by Prime Minister of Israel, May 7, 2017.Among the numerous ideological affinities and governing styles shared by
Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is a commitment to the
rhetoric of ‘fake news.’ In the
last year, Netanyahu has increasingly borrowed this Trumpian formulation in an
attempt to quell dissent and undercut critical Israeli and international media
scrutiny.

Of course, Netanyahu is not unique in this regard. Over the course of the last year, authoritarian
regimes across the globe – including Syria, Russia and Malaysia – have adopted
the fake news script to silence detractors and critics, frequently in response
to the charge of human rights violations.

But while the global scale of this accusation may
be unprecedented, charges of fake news have a long history, considerably
preceding the Trump era. In Israel, the accusation of fraudulence, employed against
political critics and foes, can be traced to the onset of the Zionist
settler-national project. As
postcolonial studies show, the repudiation of indigenous claims (to history,
land, humanity and so on) was a foundational logic of colonial projects,
enabling the violence of colonialism in its various forms.

This formulation was also at work
in the history of Zionism and has had a lasting hold on
dominant Israeli ideology. Over the course of the last two decades, amidst the
ascendance of nationalist extremism in Israel, the fraudulence charge has grown
ever stronger among the Jewish right-wing public as a popular means of indicting critics and undercutting Palestinian claims, particularly where
Israel’s military occupation is concerned.

Mohammed al-Dura

Video footage of Israeli state violence against
Palestinians has been a favorite target of this accusation – footage shot by
international journalists and human rights workers and increasingly, as cameras
have proliferated in the West Bank, by the cameras of Palestinians living under
occupation.

It was in the language of fake news that Israelis famously responded to
the killing of twelve-year-old Mohammad al-Dura by the Israeli security
services in 2000, in the early days of the second Intifada.[1] His
killing was filmed by French television and was replayed around the world in
the aftermath of the event, becoming no less than a viral global icon of the
Israeli military. What ensued was an organized campaign by the Israeli right wing,
and their international supporters, to debunk the images as fake.

Netanyahu convened an Israeli government committee of inquiry in 2012 to
investigate the incident, and the committee eventually endorsed the popular discourse
of fakery, blaming manipulative editing for falsely producing the damning images.
The state committee did more than
exonerate the Israeli security services in al-Dura’s death; indeed, they argued
that he was not actually dead. Right-wing Israeli newspapers put it succinctly in
their headlines: “Mohammed al-Dura: The Boy Who Wasn’t Really Killed.” Pleas by
the al-Dura family to exhume the boy’s body were declined. The state committee did more than
exonerate the Israeli security services in al-Dura’s death; indeed, they argued
that he was not actually dead.

Despite the Israeli response to the al-Dura affair in 2000, it would
take nearly two decades for this argument about Palestinian fakery to become
commonplace where video evidence of Israeli state violence is concerned. By
2014, amidst the ascendance of far-right politics in Israel, and the
threatening spread of cameras among Palestinians living under occupation, the
argument finally gained a mainstream foothold.

Footage from Bitunya

For example, the charge of fake news would predominate in Israel
following the killing of two Palestinian
youths in the West Bank town of Bitunya in 2014, fatally shot by the Israeli
security services during an annual demonstration commemorating the Nakba. The military denied
responsibility, claiming that their forces had only used non-lethal rubber
bullets that day, in compliance with regulations governing engagement in
protest contexts.[2]
But the scene had been filmed by numerous on-site cameras, including four
security cameras, and those of CNN and a Palestinian photojournalist. The Israeli
human rights organization B’Tselem took on the case, believing that the unusually
high volume of associated footage conclusively established military
responsibility for the deaths.

But mainstream Israelis felt
differently, and the volume of footage from Bitunya did little to persuade
them of the military’s responsibility. To the contrary, the videographic
evidence fueled a widespread repudiation campaign. State actors and
institutions were among the first to join the fake news chorus, including the defense
minister, the foreign minister and official military spokesmen. But mainstream
Israelis felt differently.

All argued that “the film was edited
and d[id] not reflect the reality of the day in question.”
Their assertions were parroted by the national
media, who insisted that the shootings were “staged and faked.”
That accusation was then
picked up by right-wing Israelis and supporters internationally. Some focused on
the image of the falling body, arguing for its self-evident theatricality (yet another
case of what some called “Pallywood” – the purported Palestinian Hollywood-like
industry in manufactured images of Palestinian victims). Others claimed there
was a lack of adequate blood in the footage, proof that the victim had not been
killed. Most proponents of the fraudulence charge did not dispute the deaths
themselves, as they had in the al-Dura case, but focused on exonerating the IDF
through a re-reading of the footage, arguing that the bullets had come from
other sources.

The charge of fraudulence haunted
the case as it wound its way through the Israeli legal system. The Bitunya
case established the fake news charge as a default Israeli script for
responding to videographic evidence of state violence against Palestinians. A few months hence, during another violent Israeli military incursion
into the Gaza Strip, Prime Minister Netanyahu would famously rehearse a variant
of this discourse when he accused Gazans of performing their deaths for the media:
“They want to pile up as many civilian dead as they
can. They use telegenically dead
Palestinians for their cause.” The language of “fake news”
had moved from the margins of the conspiratorial blogosphere to become the
language of state – presaging a dynamic that we would watch unfold in the US in
the Trump era, a few years hence. State actors and institutions
were among the first to join the fake news chorus, including the defense
minister, the foreign minister and official military spokesmen.

High stakes

For Israelis who support the fake news accusation, the stakes are
considerable – just as they are in Trump’s America for those who parrot this
rhetoric. In the Israeli context, these accusations aim to protect the image of
Israel by stripping Palestinian victims and Israeli perpetrators from the
videographic scene of the alleged crime – and to do so in a way that removes
all traces of repressive Israeli military rule and its histories. The charges
of fraudulence, forgery or Palestinian theatrics are an attempt to correct the
record, to right the wrongs done by a libelous Palestinian public that is
intent on Israel’s defamation by means of fictive image-making – or so many
believe. In this way, the discourse of fake news is just another tool in the
Israeli struggle against the so-called existential threat.

This article was originally published in Middle East Report, Issue 283.

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